sports/スポーツ

supootsu (スポーツ) - sports

I've taken a liking to sports anime recently, partly because they're fun to watch, and partly because they're easier for me to understand. A lot of sports terms, including most of the names of the sports themselves, are borrowed from the English. Tennis, soccer, basketball, and even bowling and billiards and curling can all be referred to by a Japanese pronouciation of the English name.

Some sports have acquired a sort of contraction of their English names in Japanese because the English versions are too long if they want to be specific, like American football (ame fuuto/アメフート) and volleyball (baree/バレー or biichi baree/ビーチバレー). Baseball (yakyuu/野球) is the only sport I've heard referred to mainly by its Japanese name, although they also use the English.

Most of the sport-specific terms are borrowed from the English as well. In fact, tennis is played almost entirely in English, which makes it easy for me to follow :) The English words have different meanings sometimes, like "home in" instead of "home run" or "spike" instead of "cleats," but they're pretty easy to remember. Even if most of the sports terms I hear are from English, there are still plenty of Japanese words that I hear repeatedly because of watching sports anime. Here are a few:

shouri (しょうり、勝利) - victory
katsu (かつ、勝つ) - to win
makeru (まける、負ける) - to lose
hashiru(はしる、走る) - to run
tobu (とぶ、跳ぶ) - to jump (with a different kanji, 飛ぶ, the same pronounciation could also mean "to fly")
utsu (うつ、打つ) - to hit
nerau (ねらう、狙う) - to aim at or target